Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

Happy for battle.

Aila wrote every month; about family matters. Five hundred words. That was the limit prison regulations allowed. The letters always ended 'Lots of love from all of us'. One prison day that was just like the last there was a letter in a different kind of envelope, addressed on a typewriter. It was from her, Hannah Plowman. Inside, he saw her handwriting for the first time, that voice which speaks from absence. Just a note to say how relieved everyone was (this he read as referring to the reduced sentence; in the know, she was well aware he was lucky not to get even more than five years). Anything we could do (the inference: her organization) to smooth the way where he found himself, or to assist his family, he had only to tell his lawyer. The last line of the single page abandoned the corporate 'we'. This letter ended: 'I know you'll come out happy for battle'.

He realized the wonderful phrase must be a quotation and he was stirred, intrigued to know from where, from whom. There was a message for him in the three words even beyond their aphoristic meaning, which, in itself, unravelled his whole life— how could she, a stranger, possibly have divined that, in his quiet, schoolmaster's being, joy had come first only when he stepped out and led chanting children across the veld to face the police! The message beyond that extraordinary prescience— that would enlarge upon it, confirm a language of shared reference between himself and the writer of the letter — was obviously something she assumed he would understand. Whoever it was who had said or written those three words must represent something particular not only to his present situation in prison but to a whole context of thought and action in which that situation was contained. The phrase didn't come from Shakespeare. Of that at least he thought he could be pretty sure although he could not reach up to the familiar shelf in the glass-fronted bookcase for verification. There were so many gaps in his education although it had seemed awesomely high to the old people who kept his teacher's training certificate framed in the kitchen where they could always see it.

The phrase filled, for a few days, the hours that were so hard to fill, left over from the disciplined programme he had set himself in his cell — deep-breathing exercises, running on the spot, study, reading. Prisoners were made to keep the bedtime of chickens and children. The cell lights were extinguished early and he had not yet succeeded in being advanced to the grade where he would have permission to keep his on for night study. Happy for battle. He lay on his bed in the dark and sounded over in his mind that phrase, so simple, so loaded, audacious, such a shocking, wild glorious juxtaposition of menace and elation, flowers and blood, people sitting in the sun and bodies dismembered by car bombs; the harmonized singing coming from somewhere in the cells, and the snarl of a police dog leaping at his face, once, in a crowd.

It was Hannah who wrote to him: knew how to say everything in three, let alone five hundred words.

He wrote and asked her to apply to the Commissioner of Prisons for a visit but she answered that she did not want to use up one of the quota of visits his family certainly needed.

Needing Hannah.

Oh Aila, Aila.

Why did Aila never speak? Why did she never say what he wanted her to say?

Family matters. He had never built the tree-house with Will and now the boy would be too old to be interested. Baby was being inducted into women's things; between her and her mother. At least he had been able to provide Baby with a room of her own for the process of becoming a woman.

Oh Aila, Aila.

For I don't know how long we believed my mother didn't know. He and I. We were so clever; he made us such a good team, a comic team. What a buffoon he made of me, his son, backward, stumbling along behind, aping his lies. Poor Tom to his Lear (I should have told him that, sometime, it's the sort of sign he'd appreciate that my education hasn't been wasted). I don't think he ever told direct lies, at least when I was around. When he went off to his woman he never said he was going to be somewhere else; he didn't have to, my mother respected the fact that a man doing underground political work (his full-time clandestine occupation once he came out of prison) cannot reveal his movements without involving and endangering his family.

The walls in what was meant to be a white man's house aren't like those in the house outside Benoni through which we couldn't help hearing the neighbours' quarrels and sexual groans. I don't know what went on — how he managed, without me, when they were alone in their bedroom. Their bedroom with the bed-head that extended at right angles like elbows, on either side of the bed, into two small cabinets, each with a lamp for which she had made a shade, on her side the alarm clock and lemon hand-cream pot, on his an overspill of newspapers, torch, aspirins in an ashtray Baby made him when she was small, book he was currently reading. I can only imagine. Invent from what I knew of her, what I knew of what he'd become. What did he think of to say to her while he was untying the shoelaces he'd tied when he got out of bed with that woman. Perhaps when you've been married a long time it's a shared burrow you scuttle along, every feature of it, for one, known by the other, every comment on the way anticipated by the other. The bedrooms, the nights, are like that. But he came and went by secret passages; he had things to say that he never could say. He must have had to watch every word.

And not only words. Once when I got into the back seat of the car I saw something strange on the floor. Everything; anything, alerted me to danger. My mother was getting into the front seat beside him; I waited until we'd driven off and they were deciding whether or not it was necessary to go to the bank before filling up with petrol, and I was able to pick up the object without them noticing. It was the dried head of a sunflower. Just the hard disc from which the seeds had fallen. Exactly like a round honeycomb. I don't know how it could have got there. Why. I only knew he would not be able to explain it to my mother; he did not need to explain anything to me, since the cinema, when he'd told me what to see and made clear what I was not to have seen.

My mother seemed to me as she always had been. Only, because of what I was in with, with him, and so afraid of — for her — there seemed to be some kind of space around her that kept us off — him and me — and that I held my breath for fear of entering. I didn't want to be in the room alone with her, either. But if I kept out of her way she would know there was something wrong, thinking in her innocence this would be something concerning me. And if I tried to be with her, to cover up that he wasn't — that might set her thinking, and I didn't want her to think, I didn't want my mother to think about him in any other but her gentle, trusting way, changed from the old times on the Reef simply by the special respect and privacy she taught us, by her example, he had earned by the pilgrimage through prison.

It's only since Baby cut her wrists that I've known my mother knew about him all the time. Well, not at the beginning (and even I don't know when exactly that was, whether the cinema was early on), but for a long time. She surely couldn't have known when, some weeks after my father was released, she and the wives of two other men who had been in prison with him decided to give a little New Year party for them and their supporters. When she and my father made up their list of people to invite she suggested Hannah Plowman and he wrote the name without comment, as if that were just another guest. It surely would not have been like my mother to have included that woman out of some sort of guile, a test of my father's reaction, of whether the woman herself would have the nerve to come to our house, now?